PSC-ED-OUS
Moderator: Khalilah Harris
05-07-15/6:00 pm CT
Confirmation # 3658910
Page 1
PSC-ED-OUS
Moderator: Khalilah Harris
May 7, 2015
6:00 pm CT
David Johns: Awesome. So I want to say thank you for everyone and your patience today. There are always technical difficulties - the joys of working with technology and the need to teach the babies.
Thank you all for making time to join us for today’s webinar focused on recruiting and retaining educators of color. This is definitely a timely conversation for us to be having now as we are celebrating teacher appreciation week, which I think everyone on the call would agree should happen every week. But we’re inclined to celebrate when everyone wants to pause to acknowledge it.
I’m going to help direct traffic today and want to thank each of our four presenters who are going to be helping facilitate this conversation. You will all be seeing some slides to help supplement this conversation and then at the end there’s a reserved portion on our schedule for some Q and A. I will provide some additional instructions about how you can engage in that.
I want to first acknowledge and thank our collaborative partners in helping the producers of the Stanford Center for Opportunity and Policy Education and everyone in Palo Alto. This is an organization that does pretty phenomenal work. You should check out their Web site at Policy.stanford.edu - found in 2008 to foster research, policy, and practice to advance high quality, equitable education systems in the US and internationally.
For those that don’t know, that is a perfect complement to the Executive Order of the White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, which exists to leverage better resources to ensure that we’re filling both opportunity and achievement gaps in ways that supplement and support opportunities for African American students.
Our first speaker is going to be Mr. (Travis Bristol). He’s going to talk about disappearance crisis in experiences as a teacher and someone who prepares teachers. (Travis), are you ready?
(Travis Bristol): I am. Thank you David. Let me just first start by saying that I come to this work as a teacher. I spent five years teaching in English in the New York City public school system, and in my third year I started an after school program for the male students at my school. I started this program because I was troubled by the disproportionate number of male students who were (unintelligible) in the main office awaiting their meeting with the principal. Both in my class and as the group went to meet with other common men of color around the city, I didn’t see the kind of misbehavior that the young men exhibited.
Let me also say that as someone who supported pre-service teachers, I have some similar concerns about the capacity of educators to support and prepare pre-service candidates of color. And that’s - so for that reason, I went to a doctorate program to try to understand some of the environment that might increase learning for boys.
When I got to grad school, I became interested in this argument that increasing this adversity of America’s teaching force could improve learning outcomes for students of color. This is a picture of (unintelligible) (Duncan) where he’s launching the Department of Education’s black male teacher recruitment campaign, Black Men to the Blackboard. (Duncan) is quotes as saying that it is unacceptable that less than 2% of all teachers are black men.
One reason (unintelligible) (Duncan) may have suggested that it was unacceptable is that - because as we see that - because the racial diversity of students that increases - the racial and ethnic composition of teachers has not. As (unintelligible) book suggests, nationally there are three times as many Latino students in our classrooms than there are Latino teacher and almost twice as many black students as there are black teachers. Slightly more than 80% of teachers are white while (unintelligible) percent are white students.
Now the reason we should care about this divide is there is both qualitative and quantitative research that points to what I’ve termed the added value for students of color when taught by a teacher of color. But in spite of this added value, teachers of color are disappearing. As this slide notes, half of the Latino teachers have disappeared in Chicago over a ten year period and in New Orleans 20% of black teachers have disappeared over an eight year period.
So to understand why this disappearing (unintelligible), I studied this, typically focusing on why black male teachers tried to enter the profession, their experiences in teaching, and how those experiences influence their decisions to the (unintelligible).
I’ll just quickly talk about that study. What I did was I interviewed twenty-seven black male teachers in Boston in fourteen schools; seven schools with one black male teacher and seven schools with many more. I tried to understand, like I said, how they came, why they stayed, and why they left.
One finding was that -- this was true of all black male teachers on Boston -- schools without a black male teacher were more likely to have a white principal. Schools with three or more black male teachers were less likely to have a black principal. Black teachers talked about multi-pathways of entry into the profession, but most of the participants in the study talked about how an early experience into teaching influenced their decision to become a teacher. These black men worked as tutors during high school or in an after-school program and utilized that, in essence, they were doing the work as teaching.
As it related to why teachers left, nine out of the twenty-seven teachers left their schools or the profession. All nine were recruiters and these were black men who were in school with three or more teachers. And these teachers talked about the challenges of being in their schools, particularly the working conditions. They talked about the discontent with the administrative’s hyper (unintelligible) of their practice and around managing student behavior.
Now, I did find that there were some teachers who did say -- and these were loners, guys who were teaching in schools without any black male teachers. And these tend to be better schools and the teachers stayed because of the working conditions despite feeling isolated.
So here’s just some quick policies and recommendations as it relates to recruitment targeting black male teachers and to the teaching profession. Recruiting efforts at community organizations and also targeting substitute teachers.
And then finally, as it relates to retention, some of the work that might be considered should be designing what I’ve termed “differentiated professional development” for male teachers of color, implementing racial and gender awareness training for new incarnate administrators, identify schools with low numbers of black male teachers, and also think about issues or patterns of discrimination.
So with that, I’ll turn it back over to you, David.
David Johns: I appreciate that. Our next speaker is Ms. Terrenda. I should acknowledge now so that there’s no questions about this while there are three of us at least on the phone who went to Teacher’s College that there’s (unintelligible) everywhere. But I did think that very important for us to note. And so, Terrenda C. White, our client and colleague, is now Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Terrenda, are you ready?
Terrenda C. White: Yes. I’m not sure if the slides are up though. Are my slides up?
Woman: You should have access, Terrenda.
Terrenda C. White: Okay. So I still see - okay.
Woman: No one else should be touching the slides. I’m going to put you up. Okay. Let me see. Try to advance to the next slide. When you do - okay. Let’s do this.
Terrenda C. White: (Unintelligible) hasn’t been selected.
Woman: Right.
Terrenda C. White: There we go. Alright. Thank you.
So my name is (Terrenda White), as David Johns just said, and I am an alumna of Teacher’s College, but I’m currently an Assistant Professor here at the University of Colorado Boulder. And I am a professor in Education Foundation Policy and Practice. And so I just want to make sure that we do a review of what we know from research policy and practice about the issue of diversity in the teaching force and how to think about why it is we have a chronic underrepresentation of teachers of color.
I think the research community has done volumes to help us understand some of these issues, but there are new theories and explanations for why we have this gap. And in light of these particular newer understandings, I think our policy interventions definitely have to be adjusted to make sense of what’s happening.
So I’m very honored to join this particular panel. So I did - I started my research in a different city -- in New York City -- and I spent more time in schools that were being reorganized and restructured for choice and competition; but spent most of my research time in charter schools.
And I spent a lot of time with all teachers -- and particularly teachers of color -- and within the two years of my research there almost half of my participants were moving across different schools. And almost twenty-five percent of those teachers of color left teaching within the period of the work that I did, which was within two years. That was a red flag to me that we have to connect the broader issues of recruitment and retention in these newer kinds of schools that we’re creating.
So the first thing - I wanted to do an overview quickly - just a background. I just want to make sure - so we know that there’s a large - almost half of our students in US public schools are children of color and our teachers are still at around 17%. White teachers are still at about 82% even though white students are still about half of the students in our public schools.
Explanations, however, for the gap have typically focused on the demographic changes. So maybe there is a fast growth of students of color in our schools and there’s this idea perhaps there’s just a shortage of teachers of color. So the pipeline theory is much more common. We just need to increase our recruitment and bringing in more teachers of color.
And so there have been some really innovative and comprehensive approaches to improve the pipeline in terms of offering scholarships, financial incentives. There are targeted recruitments around paraprofessionals, even cadet programs with pre-college students in high schools; and even alternative certification programs have played a major role in also helping to bring in teachers of color.
However, while recruitment strategies for targeting teachers of color have been largely successful and I argue that they have been successful, we need to continue supporting all the innovations that are targeted around recruitment. What has not been successful is our retention.
So - and I’ll speak more about issues of retention, but we know diversity matters. Teachers of color are role models for all students. In many ways they’re cultural brokers for students from different cultural backgrounds. We know that they actually do impact learning gains. There’s a lot of recent research on the significant academic outcomes of same race teacher and student relationships.
And other outcomes - the most recent reports showed us that when there’s a larger number of black teachers in a school or a black principal, there’s a higher percentage of students who are referred to gifted and talented where the opposite is true. There’s an underrepresentation of black children in gifted and talented programs when the schools are not - when the numbers are lower in terms of teachers of color.
And then we also know teachers of color have typically been oriented to work in what we call hard-to-staff schools -- so schools that might be serving higher populations of students who are low income. Teachers of color typically come with an orientation to working with the -- quote, unquote -- students that are in school that are hard to staff. That’s something really important here is that they’re choosing to work in schools that other teachers might not be working in and later on we’ll see that that might present problems for teachers of color because some of our accountability policies in those schools have hit them hardest in ways that other teachers are not grappling with.
We know that most states have recruitment legislation that are specifically targeted for increasing the pipeline of teachers of color. Various states are doing a combination of things that I think is very important. Some states have a more comprehensive approach where they’re doing multiple things, and some states are relying, maybe, on alternative certification programs instead of other kinds of approaches to increasing the recruitment of teachers of color. But there are states that are doing a comprehensive approach and I say that we should push states to adopt multiple strategies for continuing the pipeline of teachers of color into schools.
But while recruitment efforts have been successful and we should continue to support them, retention has not been so successful. So in actuality, teachers of color - the rate of their growth coming into the profession has been really high. So the pace of growth collectively is about 92%. We’re almost doubling the number of teachers coming in.
And what’s really driving that percentage are Latino teachers, actually, and teachers of Asian and Pacific Islander background. The rate of growth among black teachers is slower, actually, compared to white teachers and other teachers of different ethnic groups. But collectively, the rate of growth in terms of teachers of color coming into the profession has grown over the years. But we might bring in forty-seven - and I’ll skip to the next slide.